On subscriptions and social media

On June 2, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking5 Comments

I don’t seem to have actually made an announcement when I ditched my Facebook and Instagram accounts, so I’m not actually too sure how long it’s been since they went away, but a month seems reasonable. It might have been more than that, I dunno. And while I’m not going to subject you to a lengthy blogwanking post with, like, any charts or anything like that, April and May’s traffic was … bad. Real bad. If I was the type of guy who was interested in, like, science and testing assumptions and shit I’d turn the account back on and just not interact with it at all and see if traffic goes up at all …

… but then, summer is starting, and traffic always goes up in summer anyway …

… and Facebook is fucking evil …

… and I do actually miss some people who I basically only got to interact with through Facebook, but it’s not like everyone who wants to talk to me doesn’t know exactly where to find me.

Blech.

You might remember me talking about my first Winston Box a couple of months (an actual couple of months, as my frequency for boxes was “every two months”) ago, and deciding that I was going to keep it going for one more box. I have, and it has arrived, and I am now done. First, the second Winston Box was a bag, not a box– the type of plastic packaging that Amazon sends clothes in– and God damn it the unboxing is half the fun, and if you’re called the Winston Box and you’re not sending your clothes in a box something has gone ridiculously wrong. I dunno, it’s probably petty, but it aggravated me.

Anyway, once I opened the bag, I found 1) another bland t-shirt with a graphic on it; it’s fine (I’m wearing it now), 2) a three-button, short-sleeve, collarless burgundy shirt that I was about to declare a win until I saw the weird striped cuffs on the sleeves, which I hated a lot, and 3) a pair of shorts that, from the material, I initially thought was a bathing suit, only it was just a pair of shorts and not a bathing suit, and a pair of shorts without pockets at that. I suppose it’s possible that it’s a bathing suit and just doesn’t have a liner, because I know they do that nowadays? Either way I’m not wearing them, which means this box had one thing I was neutral on and two things I actively dislike, and that’s enough to cause me to bring this experiment to a close.

In which I fight evil

On January 20, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

It was a good day. It was a stressful day– I was fully expecting someone to die somewhere because of the inauguration, and I may have more thoughts on it later. But it appears that everything went off without any violence, and the right-wing goon squad seems to have dried up and blown away without the Asshole encouraging them on Twitter. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I had a Thing happen, though, unrelated to the inauguration, and if you don’t mind I’m just going to embed a bunch of Tweets because I’d tell the story the same way here anyway.

(These appear to have embedded obnoxiously, which I apologize for, but hopefully a single click will take you straight to Twitter, where you can read these and view the images in native format.)

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039314776068098

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039563313745920

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039843921080320

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040282443939840

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040572509368322

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040810578120711

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352041885825642498

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352042001672396803

What particularly annoys me about this is that when I’m daydreaming about winning the lottery, the specific way in which I fantasize about being ultra-rich is that I want to set up a charitable foundation, and part of the way I want to use the funds for my charitable foundation is by flitting around the Internet and randomly and anonymously completely fulfilling people who post GoFundMes and various and sundry other “I’m getting evicted, please send me money” types of things. And I can imagine a world where I might actually just do a Twitter search for “credit card debt,” and then ask for Venmo addresses so I can send folks money. So I decided to take this seriously until it proved to be a scam (which was what I expected) or I somehow got $3K from the money fairy on Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, which trust me, was about to be taken as an omen.

Instead, hopefully I got to ruin a scammer’s day. I mean, probably not, but I hope at least BoA zaps that account and Twitter bans Annette. Either way, all in a day’s work, I guess.

Scam alert update

On December 9, 2020December 9, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It has been pointed out to me that the suspect checkout interface I pointed out yesterday is apparently the base checkout screen for the Shopify platform, and I had a couple of people show me legit websites that they’ve used repeatedly that use that platform. I’m going to slightly back off and modify my claim from yesterday, from a flat “avoid” to a “back out and do some research.” I’m also going to echo Elisabeth’s comment from yesterday that another thing these shitty sites have in common is Facebook and Instagram ads. You’re probably all familiar with this phenomenon; you click on one ad, sometimes by accident, or sometimes just linger over one too long and suddenly you have ads featuring the exact same pictures from several different sites.

I have a policy now; if I recognize a photo of a piece of merchandise from another ad, I start reporting every single ad where I see that photo as a scam. I have threatened to do this before and not followed through, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been to shutting down both Facebook and Instagram for good. I have here, TikTok and Twitter; that really ought to be enough social media for everyone.

Not much else going on today, but I thought I’d point all that out.

In which I apologize in advance

On September 10, 2020September 10, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

It’s happening again, somehow– my first viral video on TikTok is now up to 3.7 million views and really hasn’t slowed down all that much, and I woke up this morning to discover that one I posted last night had amassed 130K views overnight and has tacked on another hundred thousand in the 10 hours I’ve been awake.. The first video got me from around 50 to just under a thousand followers; this one has taken me from 900+ to 2100 in less than a day.

I am apparently at least a little good at this.

I still have over five times the following on Twitter that I have on the TT account, but TikTok gets massively more engagement than Twitter does. It’s kind of shocking how much of a difference there is given that TT doesn’t have any sort of “retweet” type of function.

(I know I’m still kind of being a dick by not posting my address on here, for those of you who care. It’s because it’s under my real name, and I’m still trying to avoid crossing the streams, so to speak. If you’re curious, email me or drop a comment and I’ll let you know individually.)

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be somebody who gets this kind of engagement on every single post. I was just starting to break away from constantly checking my notifications inside the app like a rat in a Skinner box looking for a heroin fix, and now it’s started all over again. I assume that once it starts happening all the time you get over it, but it’s nuts how constant the new notifications are. There have been sixteen while I’ve been writing this, for example, and I write fast, and they’ve started to slow down because everything always slows down around this time of day. If this behaves like the other one, in an hour or so I will be able to clear my notifications, then reload and immediately have new ones, and I’ll be able to do that constantly. It’s nuts.

Still looking for a way to monetize this. At some point in the last 24 hours they decided I was important enough to unlock live-streaming on the app, which is terrifying and I’m not going to do it. If I get another 98,000 followers I can join the Creator Fund, but I gotta figure that’s still a ways off, right?

… right?

Yes. Definitely.

In which I complain about my good fortune

On September 1, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Teaching1 Comment

I am, technically, monitoring my classes while I’m typing this right now; it’s just that today’s assignment fell apart due to an utterly inexplicable block on a web service that was kiiinda essential to my kids being able to do what I wanted them to do today. Were I in a regular classroom I could photocopy a worksheet or some shit, or quickly rework, but when I don’t quite realize how widespread the problem is until half of my kids have already checked in and back out for the day there’s not much I can do to get them back.

So! Turns out this is going to be an easier day than I expected, if a somewhat more frustrating one, and the hidden good news is that I was testing something that I need for tomorrow and it’s very very good that I figured this out early! This is actually exactly why we test things. Today is shot, but they’re actually expecting us to administer standardized tests remotely this week, so tomorrow will be much more functional now that I know how This Thing is going to work. So … yay?

I talked about this a bit earlier this week, but I may as well talk about it some more, since it’s still going on: my viral TikTok video is now up to 2.1 million views, 124,800 Likes and 753 comments, and I am officially in the stage of Having Created a Viral Thing where I am completely fuckin’ over it. On Twitter you can simply mute a post or a thread when this happens, but you can’t do that on TikTok. My stupid, stupid rat brain keeps going back and checking the post like my phone is a Skinner box, and also much like a Skinner box the number of times I have to hit reload for the dopamine hit is getting higher and higher.

Plus, Jesus, the video is literally two sentences long and there are three sentences of text on the screen, and the number of people who think they’re being clever in comments who clearly didn’t manage to read like twelve words is beginning to aggravate. There’s also a weird subgroup of people who are coming in and insisting that the word פיצה, which is an English cognate because it’s an Italian word to begin with, doesn’t mean “pizza.”

Which … yeah, it does, and why are you like this? I literally looked up a couple of Israeli pizza joint’s websites and posted them in response to one of these comments yesterday. Go argue with them, dude.

I’ve also picked up about 600 new followers, and the number of straight-up children who have access to that app is kind of shocking. I’m going to start blocking anyone who appears to be nine years old and follows me, because … just … nah.

(And I recognize that I’m kind of being a dick by talking about the video and not linking to it, but remember, the account is under my actual name. If you want to see it, email me or something and if you’ve been around long enough that I recognize your name I’ll send you the link.)

In other news…

On August 29, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek7 Comments

Right now the only social media account that I have under my actual name is one of my two TikTok accounts. I have one for Luther, but I haven’t posted any videos. I am, however, posting videos under my teacher account, which until about 22 hours ago had about 40 followers. The account was giving me a mild reason to celebrate, though, because I’d just had my first video that scored over 2000 views before fizzling out.

And then I found a video of an Asian woman (her race is relevant) getting a tattoo and noticed that one of her tattoos, oddly, was the word “pizza,” spelled phonetically in Hebrew. (It may be a cognate; I’m not sure.) As the account posting the video was all in (I think) Chinese, and pizza is, as far as I know, not a hugely common food in Southeast Asia, nor are Jews, I made the not-foolproof-but-still-defensible-I-think suggestion that maybe people shouldn’t be tattooed in languages they can’t read and posted a short video saying such.

It’s now at 1.1 million views and counting, with over 60,000 Likes, and I’ve gained over 300 followers since it went up. There is also what appears to be a lively argument in Hebrew and Arabic going on in comments, and I have no idea what the hell they’re talking about, although Palestine may be involved.

I now have a viral Tweet under my belt with over six million views, a viral TikTok, and a couple of viral blog posts, although the biggest viral blog post only had a comparatively-paltry 110,000 views. I think it is fair to suggest that I may be the king of all social media. Now I just need to find a way for it to make me some money. 🙂

In which I have no patience for white nonsense

On August 24, 2020August 25, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

So it’s happened again, another unarmed young Black man who posed no threat whatsoever shot in the back multiple times by police officers. Amazingly, as of right now Jacob Blake is still alive, despite being shot seven times at point-blank range by someone who was attempting to murder him.

I just had a student lose a younger brother– a nine-year-old– to a gunshot. And neither of these things will ever stop, because America loves guns more than it loves children or Black people combined, and white people in this country will put up with absolutely anything so long as they can see people of color nearby who have it worse than they do.

I finished up with my classes today and decided to do something I don’t do very often, which is go take a swim in the pool by myself. Before I did, I spent a moment randomly scrolling through TikTok and found a video by a Black woman who was clearly reacting to Blake’s shooting. I duetted the video– which, for those of you who don’t do TikTok, is basically that app’s version of Twitter’s comment-RT, but did mine over a black background and just put “Nothing I need to add here; BLACK LIVES MATTER” in my side of the screen. I was basically just doing a signal boost.

(Which turned out utterly unnecessary, as the account I was duetting was MUCH bigger than mine, but whatever.)

Well an hour later I got out of the pool and discovered that my most famous TikTok video is now one that I don’t actually appear in. It’s gone very mildly viral (very mildly; I only have about 40 followers and don’t have much reach there) but for some reason it was getting a lot more commentary and Likes than usual, especially compared to the number of views.

And, man, y’all, there’s a whole lot of racists on TikTok. I am desperately tired of white people who somehow in August of 2020 still want to pretend that any of the following are true:

That “All Lives Matter.” No, they don’t, and this has been explained to you repeatedly, and I assume at this point anyone who says this is either a racist or too stupid to live.
That “Blue Lives Matter.” There is no such thing as Blue Lives, and you are a racist— and an asshole– if you try this one. Cops choose to be cops. This is not a thing.
Oh if you just follow instructions you’ll be fine. Not true, not at all. Especially when there’s five different cops all barking different sets of instructions at you. Also: Tamir Rice. Also: Philando Castile. Also: Charles Kinsey.
If they weren’t doing anything wrong, they’d have been fine. Also not true! See: Tamir Rice again. See: Breanna Taylor. See: Botham Jean. See: Atatiana Jefferson.

Cops kill Black people because cops in this country are racist and overfunded and overarmed and utterly fucking out of control. The police are a street gang with no accountability whatsoever. I also had to contend with this piece of risible horse shit today:

Jake Tapper needs to stop using the incorrect terms “defunding the police” and “ abolishing ICE.” No sane Democrat wants to do these things. The right wing has usurped the words to confuse people. Jake doesn’t need to add to these lies.
— Joy Behar (@JoyVBehar) August 23, 2020

Oh, I absolutely do want to do these things, and frankly I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t. And I am far from the only fucking one. Shut the fuck up, Joy Behar, and take your idiot bullshit with you. I’m not in the mood.

At any rate, I’ve discovered that you can’t delete comments on TikTok once they’re made, but you can block commenters, and I’ve been making sure that no one gets a chance to be dumb twice. Because unless I actually do get paid to educate you, I don’t get paid to educate you, especially for something that by this point in this year of all times you should bloody fucking already know.

Enough of this bullshit. Be better, white people.